• CommanderCloon
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    19 hours ago

    Side channel attacks are as old as computing, and the specific CPU variants exploiting speculative execution have not simply occurred on 2018 hardware and stopped since; pretty much all CPU architecture is susceptible to some form of speculative execution exploit, Apple simply is not an exception to the rule, and I think it’s unfair to call them out as somehow incompetent for making the same mistake as literally everyone

    https://www.vusec.net/projects/ghostrace/

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      That’s a cool article, I had a quick read and will go back to it later.

      Inter-Process Interrupt seems to be very cool, but the fact you have to start it exactly when a pointer in the kernel is created makes it a big hit and miss, and the fact one cpu is frozen during the process may make it easy to detect she counter.

      I can and will call Apple many things such as unusually greedy, the new Microsoft that got big decade ago and have to buy companies to have new successful products, marketing brainwashing, cult and more. But not incompetent when it comes to M1.

      M1 laptops performance is not due to what most people believe, and all the side channel attacks unique to it I’ve heard from, come from speculative memory address loads. It’s pushing speculation in directions neither Intel nor AMD or Arm chips did before, and they’re released in a time where side channel attacks are starting to be very l well understood.

      I’m sure there was an engineer saying this was a bad idea, over ruled by a manager under the pressure of CFO to make it happen. So I blame this on greed.